4 Best Free WordPress Themes for Food Bloggers

The post 4 Best Free WordPress Themes for Food Bloggers appeared first on HostGator Blog . Got a taste for food blogging? A good blog theme is a key ingredient in your food blog’s success . The right theme showcases your food posts, recipes, and photos beautifully, and it can also do more. A theme that supports WooCommerce or another e-commerce plugin for WordPress makes it easier for you to earn money from your blog. An SEO-friendly theme makes it easier for new readers to find your blog. And a theme that’s designed to be lightweight and responsive will load fast, even on mobile phones, to ensure that the people who find your blog will stick around and enjoy your content. If your current food blog theme isn’t doing all those things, it may be time to replace it with something fresher. Here are four WordPress themes we like for foodies because they serve up great features for free. Best WordPress Themes for Food Blogs Is your food blog’s theme past its expiration date? Here are four fresh, free options.   1. MH Food Magazine This food-focused child theme of MH Magazine gives you the visual equivalent of a beautifully laid out buffet, with a three-column home page that features an array of five featured post images above the fold, topped by a 4-column header with thumbnail images and post headlines. The mobile display is a single column that alternates between full-width featured images with post excerpts and smaller thumbnail images in columns or arrays. MH Food Magazine is a visually busy theme, but if you have a lot of content already in your blog archives or if you’re generating new posts at a rapid pace, this theme will let you show off a lot of it to your readers at a glance. Add the Contact Form 7 plugin, customize your widgets, or display ads with the tools in the free version. The premium version is the parent theme, MH Magazine ($49). It offers fully customizable design elements, 26 widget locations, a news ticker, and extensive support.   2. Recipe Lite Recipe Lite from SKT Themes is a Gutenberg-compatible theme that serves up a professional look with modular editing capabilities so you don’t need to code to get the look you want. Recipe Lite’s desktop display features a three-image slider banner over a row of three featured images for your posts. Category sections follow, along with a newsletter sign-up form, a recent posts image grid, and a sidebar with a bio section and social media links. The display switches to a single column for smartphones. The free version of Recipe Lite is a good-looking theme that’s well suited for bloggers who have a lot of recipes or posts to archive. The pro version ($39) adds hundreds of Google font options, color and layout options, email and Skype support, and shortcodes you can use to add photo galleries , testimonials, flipboxes, and other elements.   3. Food Recipes This image-heavy theme from Faster Themes skips the trendy slider banner in favor of a two-column desktop layout that features four images above the fold next to the sidebar. The background is customizable, so you can use an image or keep things plain to make your featured post images stand out more. Food Recipes really shines on smartphones, where its single-column, uncluttered display makes it a good choice for bloggers whose readers use their phones to display recipes while they cook. The pro version of Food Recipes ($39) adds 1-click updates, six color scheme options, super-fast page loads, WooCommerce compatibility, and Google Fonts.   4. Foodies Foodies from Indigo Themes keeps the focus on the food. The homepage displays an array of 3 or 4 columns (single column on smartphones) of featured photos that invite readers to explore your recipes and posts. The recipe image grid calls to mind the vintage photo recipe cards of the 1970s, although the theme’s tone is fresh and modern. The free version of Foodies is SEO-friendly and designed with affiliate marketing in mind. It gives you full control of theme colors, supports left-to-right language translation, and is responsive and fast-loading. Foodies Pro ($49) adds an SEO-friendly recipe post template for easy formatting, filters for sorting posts and recipes, and AJAX-powered posts that display individual recipes over the homepage or category page quickly, without taking time to refresh the whole page.     Choosing a Food Blog Theme that Suits Your Taste Most theme publishers offer a live demo view of their themes, although you may have to view them on both a computer and a smartphone to see how they’ll look on each type of device. (Some, but not all, live previews will let you choose different device display options on your computer.) If you like the way a theme looks in live previews, the next step is to download it and try it out with your own blog content on as many devices as you can access. It’s a wise move to do this with a few themes you like before you make a decision. That’s because you can’t get a true sense of how the theme will work for your food blog until you try it with your posts and photos. While you’re trying out your shortlisted themes, ask yourself how well they support your goals for your blog, how well they support the way your readers use your content, and how fast they load your content. If most of your readers follow your recipes at home on their phones, a theme that displays recipe posts clearly, without requiring multiple taps or slides, is a must. If you plan to sell subscriptions or products on your blog, your theme needs to be compatible with WooCommerce or other plugins . And every blog needs to load fast for SEO and readership. Once you pick a theme, ask your readers what they think of it and listen to their feedback. Like a recipe that needs adjusting to taste just right, your new theme may need some tweaks to keep your readers happy. Keep listening and adjusting as needed and your fans will keep coming back to see what you serve up next. Find the post on the HostGator Blog